Guden Oden said:
Companies like to tout the performance increase raid0 gives (double the transfer rates, yay!), but fact is, disk I/O is almost never transfer rate limited, but rather access time limited. And there, raid0 gives almost zero to very little benefit, so the net performance gain in the real world is very weak. I myself would say it doesn't outweigh the doubled chance of failure.
I mostly agree with you, but there are real uses for Raid-0 (as opposed to "hey, look at me!") and video editing is one of them. I am, of course, talking about
real video editing here, where you are working with 200GB+ of vidoe data that must be processed. This is what amounts to a very long sequential read and access times are not really part of the equation. However, depending on how you work, you can live without RAID/a fast drive by making the processor(s) the bottleneck.
RAID-0 might be a viable solution for this type of task because the data spends relatively little time on the hard disk. Typically you would have a workstation with one or two RAID-0 arrays and the system disk separated and un-Raided. This allows you to quickly pull data streams from one array and save to another. There is still the problem of reads being faster than writes so you can never have a perfectly balanced system.
"Lone Wolf" video manipulation and editing may not benefit as greatly because you can typically go from raw footage to final product in one sweep without the need for several slightly altered versions (like just a light balancing pass or color correction). In this scenario you are processing so much in a single pass that the CPU becomes the bottleneck and drive speed won't matter and raid-0 would only be a liability (but raid-JBOD might be useful to increase capacity of a 'single drive/partition')
Overall, I don't recommend raid-0 as a frivolous feature. Raid-1 might be good if you are scrared of losing data, but even then there are other options for backup, even if they may be more laborious. Raid-0 as sold today at low prices is very gimmicky. If you are serious about it you buy a Raid card at $1,000 and drives for as much, making the I in Raid less than realistic at consumer prices (the I can mean inexpensive, but is sometimes taken to mean independent).
Guden mentioned access times and here the cheap onboard (soft) solutions can actually hurt performance. The two drives must be synchronized for the magic to happen and, if anything, this will probably hurt your access times as you are now dependent on two landing zones instead of one.
Lastly, Raid can always be added at a later stage. Remember, you don't need your system drive raid-0ed. The real benefit would be with one or two raid-0 scratch disks to temporarily keep the data on (I don't mean scratch as only virtual memory or paging, but as a temporary space for any data; your raw video). People are sold things based on the technology and, especially, the acronyms alone, but if you want a real solution you would do well to back off and see the need grow so you know exactly what components you need. You might be better off with two 74GB 10K RPM drives or maybe you tend to work with uncompressed (or Huffyuv) and be better served with slightly slower drives of 400GB each.
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